The invention relates generally to person-to-person money transfers, and more particularly facilitating money transfers related to listings at vending sites.
One party may wish to transfer money to herself, a counter party, or vice versa, for any of a variety of reasons. For example, a payor may wish to give the money to the payee as a gift, or the payee may receive payment for an auction item sold to the payor. If the receiving party to the transfer is a merchant with a merchant credit card account, payment is received in the conventional way. Person-to-person payments apply to situations where the receiver of the payment does not have access to a merchant credit card account. For example, the payee in a person-to-person transaction may be a merchant of goods without the ability to accept credit card payments directly because a merchant credit card account is lacking.
Until recently for person-to-person payments, payors typically complete such payments via cash, check or money order because the payee does not have the ability to receive money electronically. Electronic payment methods are generally available to merchants, such as credit cards and bank account debits through electronic fund transactions, however, the payor may not have access to these methods for whatever reason. For example, these electronic payment methods for merchants may require purchasing hardware and/or software to support accepting payment.
Auction sites, such as eBay™, provide action services that often involve parties without access to merchant account for accepting payment. Today, these parties often rely upon online money transfer systems. Often a button is inserted into auctions that the payor may activate to link to the online money transfer system. This button may embed a user identifier for the payee that is passed to the online money transfer system when the payor activates the link. The user identifier is used in one example to inform the online money transfer system who referred the payor.
There are web sites that will auto-insert information into auction listings for various purposes. For example, an online money transfer system may insert buttons into all the auction listings for a particular user. The user provides the web site with a user name and password for the auction site and the web site finds all the active auction listings. A button is inserted into each active listing associated with the user.
In the appended figures, similar components and/or features may have the same reference label. Further, various components of the same type may be distinguished by following the reference label by a dash and a second label that distinguishes among the similar components. If only the first reference label is used in the specification, the description is applicable to any one of the similar components having the same first reference label irrespective of the second reference label.